WASHINGTON – Christianity, warns author Dr. Calvin Beisner, is facing a new and growing challenge that threatens to infiltrate the church and degrade its gospel message from within.

Beisner, national spokesman for the biblical environmental stewardship group Cornwall Alliance, spoke to WND about the danger of the radical environmentalist worldview encroaching upon the church’s message and the church’s growing capitulation to environmentalist thought.

The Cornwall Alliance describes itself as “a coalition of clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts committed to bringing a balanced biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development,” but Beisner says that vision is very different from the green agenda being pushed by the world.

Beisner describes radical environmentalism in stark contrast from a biblical worldview on the environment through the use of the term “Green Dragon.”

The “Green Dragon,” Beisner explains, is a “term to refer to teachings … that are opposed to Christ and his work in his world, because they come from an environmentalist worldview and perspective.”

The centrality of this teaching according to Dr. Beisner is the exaltation “of the creation rather than the Creator.” He adds that it is designed to “undermine a biblical understanding of the world and man’s place in the world.”

In contrast to the Christian doctrine of Imago Dei, meaning man is created in the image of God, thereby giving him highest value on this earth, the environmental movement looks at humans as the source of evil and earthly problems, for they are in the environmentalist worldview “consumers and polluters, rather than stewards.”

“Environmentalism, because of its denial of the Creator-creature distinction,” Beisner says, “is anti-biblical.”

Beisner contends Christians should be diligent in their faith to prevent any type of syncretism with the “religion” of environmentalism. He warns that Christians, by abandoning the absolute authority of Scripture, have begun to tolerate the introduction of non-biblical and anti-biblical views that have grown commonplace in the wider culture.

Christians, Beisner warns, “simply accept … different claims made by different environmental organizations” without investigating the issues themselves. Such topics as species extinction, manmade global warming or climate change and rapid depletion of farmland, he says, “lack solid empirical evidence” and are “based upon modeling, rather than empirical observation.”

You don’t have to be a scientist in order to understand the subject matter at hand, Beisner told WND, but Christians “also need to learn as much of the science and economics of environmental matters as we can, so that we’re able to make wise discernments amongst the various claims, rather than simply taking the word of some different scientists for that.
.

“We must be careful not to subjugate the authority of Scripture to the authority of science,” he said. “We also must be careful to not naively think that science is some monolithic body of knowledge when it isn’t.”

Furthermore, Beisner claims, the failure of intellectual and spiritual integrity on the part of the faithful has lead to Christianity actually working to promote radical environmentalism.

“All of the large ecumenical organizations have jumped onboard [with the green agenda],” he said.

But Christians aren’t merely the victim of their own ignorance, Beisner says, for external forces are working behind the scenes to “green the Christian message.”

The National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), Beisner states, “was funded heavily by the Rockefeller Foundation and other such foundations and heavily influenced by … Green Peace and the World Wildlife Federation.”

“It had the specific agenda of infiltrating synagogues and churches, to ‘green’ the message that comes from the pulpits,” Beisner says.

The agenda behind this greening? Removing the human “scourge” from the planet, claims Beisner.

“The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was founded by David Rockefeller in the late 1950s,” Beisner told WND, “specifically because he thought that the Rockefeller Foundation, which was very powerfully supporting population control, wasn’t going far enough because it didn’t support the use of incentivization and coercion in abortion in population control and family development programs in developing countries.”

The radical environmentalists, according to Beisner, believe that “humans should be breeding in a manner that puts as little imprint upon this earth as possible, [to] go back to a hunter-gatherer society, because they despise industrialized society. … They put the ecological health of the earth over the health of humanity.”

Beisner adds that this nature of environmentalism inherently makes it totalitarian.

“The environment is literally everything, which means that environmentalism is everything and we have another word in the English language for ‘everything,’ and that is totalitarianism,” Beisner said. “Environmentalism has a natural tendency to totalitarianism toward wanting to run every aspect of our lives, from the minutest detail to the largest world-scale aspect.”

When asked what Christians can do in response, Beisner told WND, “Our task is outlined for us in Genesis 1:28, in summary that we are to be fruitful and multiply … our dominion over the earth is to reflect God’s dominion.

God is very creative, and He likes an abundance of variety,” Beisner added. “Our task is to reflect the creativity, the love of variety, the love of fruitfulness that God shows in His creation, so that we come to enhance the fruitfulness of the earth, to enhance its beauty and to enhances its safety to the glory of God and the benefit of our fellow man, whilst addressing simultaneously the two great commandments to love God and to love our neighbor.”

Beisner warned, however, that Christians need to be balanced by Scripture rather than by modern culture, citing how often Christians get wrapped up too much in supporting capitalism for capitalism’s sake, even when it is detrimental to the environment, because they do not want to be in anyway supporting socialism.

“Business is a God ordained thing, and I think it happens best in a free market society,” Beisner said, “but at the same time, business people are sinners like the rest of us. They are going to want to minimize their costs.”

The failure of Christians to be intellectually engaged in the environmental discussion is not inevitable, and it is possible for a reverse, Beisner advises, but it can only be done through a strict adherence to biblical principles, rather than the world’s.